You are browsing the archive for 2009 April.

By complete chance I listened in to Dave Fanning‘s show on Radio 1 on Monday night. It’s not that I’ve anything against the man, it’s just that the radio in our kitchen is normally tuned to Newstalk at that hour.

It must have been one of those quirks of fate as the topic for the first half-hour of Dave’s show was the table quiz. Dave admitted that he’d only ever done one table quiz, and that was for a local school fund-raiser. However, Dave’s guest (and, judging by the tone of the conversation, mate) Eoin Sweeney sounded like he’d done as many table quizzes as myself and he let forth on the topic for the full 30 mins.

As is the way with radio these days, their chat was interspersed with text messages from members of the listening public and your humble correspondant saw an opportunity there to promote the blog.

Alas, my phone’s rubbish predictive text (and my own haste) meant that I messed up said text and thus, while the blog was mentioned, it was accompanied by Dave mocking my awful syntax.

This blog was born in a fit of humourous rage back in November. Since then we’ve ambled along, meeting once a week or so, for some quizzing distraction. Time flies when you’re having fun and I must have been because, almost without noticing it, the blog already has over 60 posts!

So I now feel the time has come to declare my commitment to this relationship.

To this end, you may already have noticed that the blog is no longer just plain old tablequiz.wordpress.com.

Tension was in the air last night as we arrived for the final round of The Front Door‘s latest three-part quiz. As was outlined previously (here and here) we arrived at the venue in second place overall, 1 point behind the leaders The Living Room Rats. We’d lost to them by a solitary point on night one and night two (in my absense) had been even closer, with my team-mates only prevailing following a playoff. Definitely these were worthy opponents!

Before the quiz kicked off there was some confusion as to whether we were indeed trailing. One of the staff members told us that we’d be given the extra point for last week’s playoff win and were, thus, level with the Rats. This didn’t quite ring true with our sense of things but, not wanting to stare too long at the gift horse, we said nothing. However, the same lady did come back to our table a few mins later to admit that she’d made a mistake and we were still 1 point in arrears.

The eight round quiz started with a couple of Front Door staples. Today’s News, Acting Connections and Song Titles. You’d think after doing almost 10 quizzes in this bar since the Autumn we’d be able to ace these but, no, you’d be wrong. In fact, we lost all seven of our dropped points in these first three rounds (as usual, click more…). We finally reached maximum points with 5/5 in round four, the Picture round. This gave us 10 points – that particular marking scheme being another Front Door staple.

The scores were read out for the first time at half way. We were in the lead with 33/40, with the Rats trailing in joint third on 29 points. Thus we were 3 points ahead on aggregate!

With John away again, it’s Mike filling in here with another guest blog.

People like to win. Leaving aside the “doing it for the craic” losers – yeah, right – we all love to win something, sometimes. Table quiz, office sweepstake, race to the elevator, whatever. If there’s a sense of superiority on the table, all the better. Call me an old romantic, but the nature of winning is almost equally important to me. As a Liverpool fan, I see both sides of the win/loss chasm on a regular basis, from lucky wins to games thrown away or lost to some cynical cheating. Now, a part of me just wants to win, no matter what, but I try to keep my baser instincts under wraps.

Which is why I’m so cheered at the thought of serious competition in this quizzing series. Sure, a nice easy run-in to the grand prize of €500 would be nice and all, but having to earn it, as it were, is doubly rewarding. Tonight was a case in point. Firstly, we started a point behind overall – you may remember that particular tale – so we’d a point to prove. We’d borrowed Michael Lang as an able sub since John was doing his husbandly duties and came up against no shortage of surprises. Firstly, the questions were good. Not just “good by the Front Door’s standards” but genuinely varied and challenging. They’d the usual hallmarks of being composed mere hours – maybe even minutes – beforehand but were a vast improvement on previous quizzes.

Here are the answers to the picture round and quotes I posted earlier in the Front Door‘s revenge post.

I should have pointed out that last night’s quiz was the first in a three-part event, which continues after the Easter. You can read all about it on the Front Door’s website.

The quizmaster didn’t cover himself in glory with regard to some of the answers. After asking us who had released ‘Take a chance on me‘ in the 1990s, he later told us it was “a band called Erasure” in a tone which definitely made it sound like he’d never heard of this obscure group. We also had an argument with him over the name of the Golfing Major which will be taking place this weekend. I’d written down “the masters” on our answer sheet but a point had not been awarded. “Sorry, we were looking for ‘US Masters'” was his only defence, even though the tournament is officially called “The Masters“. Thankfully, we got that one sorted out with another member of the correction team.

At last night’s quiz in The Front Door, Galway, our team reached a plateau very near the top of Mount Perfect Quiz. When the event was over and the scores were tallied, we had scored 66/70. Of the four we’d missed three had been in one round (more of that later) so, doing the maths, we’d obviously scored 10/10 in six of the night’s eight rounds.

The only problem: we didn’t win the quiz!

Yup, second place was to be our lot as our score of 72 saw us defeated by 1 point.

How 72? Well, therein lies the source of our defeat. Two of the night’s rounds contained just five questions, with each right answer getting 2 points. It was our bad luck that all of our wrong answers came in these two and, thus, our mistakes were multiplied by 2. Our particular nemisis round on this night was #5 ‘Quotes‘. The quizmaster referred to the round as “famous quotes” but, to our ears, the word “famous” could easily have been replaced by another word: “obscure”. 2/5 here (and both guesses at that) saw us concede huge ground to the eventual winners, who got all five. In other words, it was 4 points for us and 10 points for them. A 6 point gain is huge in a tight quiz and we just weren’t able to reel them back in before the night was over.